Economic tough times, job loss, greater expression, or the chance to be your own boss are just some of the reasons people start a business. The barriers to entry are relatively low and the opportunities for success often appear high.

The hurdles to success, however, are hidden at the start but invariably emerge. Be aware of what lies ahead and you increase your odds of winning.

Looking for some help with either starting or running your business?

On-Purpose Partners provides business advisory services. Our clients and customers have spanned from Founders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to wannabe entrepreneurs.

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The Service Model is an inexpensive tool to help you plan your business, anticipate what’s coming, and understand the relationships of one level of the business to the next. Order one, just one, because you can print more from the PDF.

Here’s the bottom line for your business start-up (or ongoing venture): invest the time to articulate your purpose, vision, missions, and values.

Until you know

who you are

why you are here

where you are going

and what’s important

you’re really at a major and costly strategic disadvantage.

When it comes to your small business start-up or ongoing enterprise, give yourself every advantage by being on-purpose.

Many of us grew up with a compartmentalized view of life. The wisdom of the day went along these lines: “Your personal life is your personal life. Your business life is your business life. Don’t mix the two.”

While there is something to be said for keeping healthy boundaries and focusing appropriately, there is a dangerous downside risk to one’s ethics and behaviors. As we separate our spiritual life from any part of life, we’re dis-integrating.

The cost of being off-purpose in real dollars and human terms is incalculable.

As we advance from the agrarian age to the industrial age to the knowledge age and head into the age of purpose and meaning, integration—not disintegration—is the norm. Central to each individual’s personal life is their spiritual life or faith. If you are inclined to pray in your personal life, perhaps the role of prayer in your business life is a concept you’ve never considered.

Can I Pray for Business and Career Success?

Pray unceasingly.

Pray from your spiritual tradition for wise guidance, profitable relationships, and right decisions.

Pray for your co-workers, clients, team members, vendors, and competitors(!).

Pray before you go into a meeting or on a sales call.

Just don’t pray as some sort of prosperity gospel or demand on God. To pray for business success isn’t really prayer. It is a demand and expectation for a result, not a relationship. Placing your agenda ahead of God’s agenda is akin to self-idolatry. It is the arrogance of telling God you know better. Pray, but trust God for the result that is best for your maturity and growth.

Formal and Informal Prayer

There’s formal prayer where you get down on your knees in a praying position clasping your hands together and perhaps using a book of common prayer or a guide. You may be in a service at a house of worship or next to your bed saying your prayers.

There’s also informal prayer. Invite prayer to be a casual part of your everyday walking about. Take one-minute prayer breaks. You’ll be amazed how much dead time opens on your schedule.

Do you wait for the hot water to come or the bath to fill? Pray.

Do you wait for a meeting to start? Pray.

Do you commute to work, drive to appointments, sit at your office desk, etc.? Pray!

Recognize these seemingly empty minutes and redeem the time with a prayer.

Click the book cover to buy it at amazon.com

“But Kevin, I don’t know how to pray for my business.” I hear that from time to time. A great resource for you is Our Unfair Advantage, written by my Christian friend and colleague, Dr. Jim Harris. Discover the why, what, how, and importance of getting counsel from your most important “silent partner”—the Holy Spirit.

Pray, Don’t Prey

Don’t, however, prey on people or use your faith as a means to excuse yourself from excellence, rationalize your mistakes, or create personal entitlement.

If integrity is an important value to you, then be sure to hold dear forgiveness as a complementary value. Master the art of being aware of your defensiveness, calming yourself, acknowledging your errors, asking for forgiveness, and giving thanks for the lesson learned.

You’ll become a more authentic and trusted leader when you can admit and right your wrongs within the scope of your control and authority.

This On-Purpose® Business Minute explores the power of being “on the job” and praying for owners and employees alike. What do you think? Is it right to pray for business success? Please post your answer in the comment section below.

Too often we associate profit with greed.

Truth be told, greed is an attitude of the heart that is often revealed in business but isn’t inherent to being in business.

If your heart’s desire is to truly be of service to others, then greed is likely not going to be your problem. Your challenge is just the opposite—you run so far from the appearances of greed that you overdeliver and undercharge so often that your business is hanging by a thread. Check your mindset and see if I’m right!

This On-Purpose Business Minute may be just the message you need to hear to awaken you that it isn’t your marketing, sales force, or operations that needs the adjustment—it is your internal posture about profits in need of repair.

Apart from the political implications, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare is rich in life, business, moral, and economic lessons. Since this Minute was recorded in November 2009, an erroneous and displaced argument continues to be frustratingly waged in a legal, economic, social, political, and medical firestorm. It seems, however, that there is a deeper moral question at work here.

On-Purpose Business Minutes aren’t political in nature. They’re intended to get you below the surface to strategic issues that touch our lives and inform our thinking. By design, my goal is often to disturb your thinking in a manner that gets you closer to the root of the matter — to the purpose. Until you know the purpose, you can’t align your life to be on-purpose. This Minute will likely deliver on disturbing thinking!

My jaw dropped in stunned amazement as I heard Florida Congresswoman, now Democratic National Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz make the following statement on the November 22, 2009, ABC News broadcast of This Week With George Stephanopoulos. The following quotation from Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s comments can be found in context at this link in the show transcript.

“I hope we can all agree that we have to get rid of the profit-driven, insurance company-driven health insurance system that we have, where it’s insurance company bureaucrats, Senator Coburn, that are getting in between patients and their doctors.

“To suggest that this (healthcare reform) bill will put government in between patients and their doctors is really disingenuous …”

What has changed since 2009? Her comments are important because they reflect the crux of so much of the misplaced debate in the U.S. over healthcare reform. The failure to address core principles is a classic case of arguing sentiment over underlying values and structure that make their way into policy. Read between the lines of what she is saying here about free enterprise, economics, and so forth when she calls for “get[ting] rid of the profit-driven, insurance company-driven health insurance system.” Ask yourself if her comments represent healthcare reform or a reflection of an underlying philosophy of socialism or ignorance of the free enterprise system that created the amazing medical standards of care in the United States?

Here’s where I fall out on the matter … Yes, it is not only fair to profit off of a sick person — it is essential to the health of the individual and greater society. When the business side of doctors’ practices, insurance companies, hospitals, and medical supply companies are healthy, then the people are healthy. Free enterprise tends to increase access to healthcare, raise the standard, and make it more affordable to all. Legislation by definition comes between people’s relationships and behaviors. This burdens the delivery system with additional costs of compliance and drives up costs.

The debate over access to health insurance is a straw man argument. The true question to ask is, Can a sick or injured person gain access to healthcare? Yes! That is not a problem thanks to the Hippocratic Oath and community-based hospital systems that allocate dollars from revenues generated to care for the indigent. Persons in need are not denied healthcare. “The Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Act (EMTLA) passed by Congress in 1986 explicitly forbids the denial of care to indigent or uninsured patients based on a lack of ability to pay.”

Health insurance is simply a means to pay for services on a shared risk basis that opens up more options to policy holders who choose to participate with their dollars. When every person has access to healthcare, why must every person have health insurance? The moral argument is basically settled. The ill and informed are cared for whether they can afford it or not. Society has deemed that to be essential to the well-being of the nation.

Access to healthcare is a right. Health insurance, however, is a choice — not a right. Choice, however, is the essential element of a free market economy.

Choices come with consequences. Many a time I can look back at my choices and wish I had chosen differently. But I live with my choices and learn from them.

To the original question, the profit motive fuels the engine of creativity and innovation across all sectors of the economy including bio-medicine and healthcare. Entrepreneurs and business people are like economic ants swarming to find a strategic, market, or price advantage crack to gain access to and serve customers. In some minds, this behavior is seen as being unsavory and “disingenuous” and greedy. On the other hand, the profit motive fuels cost reductions, stimulates product/service enhancements, and drives down costs to the consumer in total. Free enterprise creates freedoms in a free society. Within the free enterprise system the legal system catches and punishes those who violate the law. Profit, however, is not a criminal act.

Purpose, however, is an even greater force than profit. Purpose can lightly be thought of as the inherent desire to contribute to the well-being of another person, what is often called “Making a difference.” Purpose is service. When service and profit are integrated then the heart and the head come together to produce high and noble outcomes that profit us all.

Profit with purpose is a reason the USA has the greatest medical delivery system in the world. It is also why the USA is the wealthiest nation in the world. This combination of moral clarity, technical excellence, and business acumen provides remarkable strategic advantages.

Reform is needed, but to radically alter the course of the socio-economic sanity is the greatest threat to the health of our citizens, country, and the world — especially the coming generations.

How to reduce the costs of healthcare for yourself and the country?

Here’s the Kevin W. McCarthy Solution: 70% of Americans are overweight. Let’s encourage every American to get to a healthier place — to take personal responsibility for what they eat by making healthier choices. The rising cost of the healthcare crisis will end. Doctors will be able to practice acute care medicine instead of wasting their time and talent patching up and medicating our self-inflicted “wounds.”

The true culprit to our the healthcare crisis is a nation’s collective choices of unhealthy habits and lifestyles. Personal responsibility matters deeply in one’s health and well-being. Dumping the cost of one’s unhealthy decisions onto our neighbors isn’t loving them. It is asking our neighbors to underwrite the consequences of our poor choices.

The greatest “pork” in ObamaCare isn’t in the bill itself — although it is massive. The real “pork” is in the people who are weighting down the economy with the mindless self-selecting of diseases like Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, gout, cholesterol, and more. These obesity-related diseases lead to strokes, heart attacks, cancers, premature disability, and death — an ironic and discriminating form of Darwin’s natural selection, but a waste of human life by any measure.

Do you love your country? Then, get to a healthier place! Stop the slow killing of yourself starting today. If you can’t do it on your own, then get help. There’s no sense giving away your hard earned “profits” when you can gain health and lower the full costs of your healthcare.

Your comments are appreciated.

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

P.S. Need assistance? Ready to see “the waist” go away? Talk with the Health Coach who forwarded this message to you.

Need a health coach? Talk to my wife, Judith. She can help you get to a healthier place. Go to www.ahealthierplace.com or call her at 407.927.1642.